Economist article - 'The Sex Business'

[Sevillemarmalade]

Hi, I'm a long-term lurker rather than a poster, but I love reading the FWR threads. They keep me sane. I wanted to know if anyone had read the above article? I've just finished and feel - well, upset and uncomfortable more or less sums it up.
I know that The Economist takes a reductionist view of everything - that's it's raison d'être - but a graph showing how much female prostitutes are worth according to their physical characteristics I thought was taking it too far. It also referred to 'frustrated married men' requiring the services of prostitutes less these days because of sites like Tinder offering h

Sorry - on phone! Tinder offers hook-ups which men are using more. So does this mean women looking for casual sex are unpaid prostitutes? I wondered if anyone else had seen this and had any thoughts. Maybe IABU but it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Thanks for reading.

Is there a link to the article?

"So does this mean women looking for casual sex are unpaid prostitutes?"

"Tinder offers hook-ups which men are using more."

Or you could say "So does this mean men looking for casual sex are unpaid prostitutes"

"Tinder offers hook-ups which women are using more."

Why make a gender difference?

Link here: www.economist.com/news/briefing/21611074-how-new-technology-shaking-up-oldest-business-more-bang-your-buck

The article does deal with men buying sex from women - it explicitly refers to 'frustrated men' in the same paragraph as Tinder; it might be this male-centric point of view that's influencing my train of thought. They are analysing data from PunterNet, so no information about male prostitutes (even though they reckon they make up a fifth of the sex working population).

The point of the article is to demonstrate how the Internet is making prostitution easier and safer. I feel it is accentuating the positive rather. For me, I found the analysis of women by body part uncomfortable reading. I feel reports like this add to the general media de-humanising of women, although maybe here it's justified? Possibly I'm reading too much into data analysis.

I didn't just find the analysis uncomfortable, I found it absolutely disgusting.

". So does this mean women looking for casual sex are unpaid prostitutes"

No, not at all, because it's their choice. It's true that the internet allows two people in other relationships to hook up when before they might never have met or might never have broached the subject of cheating if they had met.

But I'm not sure that the drivers of someone looking for a mutually satisfying sexual encounter and those of someone looking to pay for sex are the same.

Cailindana - I'm glad I'm not alone.
A Bland - I see what you mean about drivers. I hope the writers of the article felt the same way about choice. I had loads of casual sex in my twenties and I daresay if tinder etc had been available back then I'd have used them. I just feel like the paper is taking a male entitlement stance on this issue though - the whole 'women as gatekeepers' stuff. It seemed to imply that women looking for no-strings sex are merely providing a service for men in the same way prostitution does. Thanks for the replies.

The thing is, it was written by a woman. How she can justify classifying women as to how saleable they are based on the ratings of men who clearly don't even see them as animals never mind humans is beyond me.

I didn't see the author was a woman. Oh dear. I'm genuinely surprised it's been published. Discussing prostitution in the modern world is fair enough, but the angle taken is astonishing. Again, I know that's what this paper does - but I feel here its completely inappropriate. I think they're also trying too hard to tell one side of the story about the reality of prostitution with the 'happy hooker' anecdotes and I don't buy it.
And if you're not a barbie lookalike apparently you'll earn less as a prostitute. I don't even know where to begin with that. It's utterly depressing, all of it.

There has been a fair amount written about the subject in the last few days.

A critique of an academic 'john' apologist

US comedian apologist for 'johns'

Response to the above

So does this mean women looking for casual sex are unpaid prostitutes?

Utterly bizarre question. Almost as if asking it presupposes women do not lust and if they do their lust is devalued as a form of coin. Good sex does not require commitment, it requires a decent level of mutual care that sex is fulfilling. The only bad casual sex I ever had was bad not because I failed to get off but because I failed to get my partner off.

Prostitution writes that out of the picture but, I suppose, even then it does not totally because the 'holy grail' for many a john seems to be that the prostitute really enjoys having sex with him so much she refuses payment.

DWH - I think what Seville was getting at is that hook up sites are sited as a reason for the decrease in the use of prostitutes which implies that the casual sex is a replacement for the use of prostitutes. Where once men would have paid a woman for sex, women are now giving it to them for free. The issue here is the connection the writer draws between the two, which implies that what goes on between a man and a prostitute is essentially no different to what goes on between two people hooking up through Tindr, ie that one is an adequate replacement for the other. The implication is that being a prostitute is no different to looking for casual sex, except that prostitutes get paid, ie women look for casual sex are essentially unpaid prostitutes.

You could look at that the other way around of course - the implication is that prostitutes are simply women who get casual sex that they genuinely want but they also get paid for it, lucky things!

"Prostitution writes that out of the picture but, I suppose, even then it does not totally because the 'holy grail' for many a john seems to be that the prostitute really enjoys having sex with him so much she refuses payment."
This statement of yours seems to suggest something similar - that prostitution is essentially on a par with casual sex, except that money changes hands - do you believe that?

The whole thing ignores the basic reason men (ab)use prostitutes, rather than going in for no-strings sex with a woman who isn't prostituted - the power imbalance paying gives them.

Yy Basil.

It's a very house-style Economist article; I'm surprised she used "frustrated". A later sentence is more objectively phrased:

"In the long term there will always be people who, for whatever reason, want to hire a prostitute rather than do without sex or pick up a partner in a bar. "

Thanks for those articles, CaptChaos - it's a buyer's market, all right...
It worries me that bright, well-educated men are making no apologies for buying sex. I want men to understand a little bit about how most of these women live and empathise with their circumstances.

This statement of yours seems to suggest something similar - that prostitution is essentially on a par with casual sex, except that money changes hands - do you believe that?

God no. I don’t believe in the self serving myths of the happy hooker/pretty woman/hooker with a heart of gold/girlfriend experience. However all those self serving constructs are probably what at least half the johns are buying into, to a greater or lesser extent. If not as imagined reality then at least as self deluded possibility. Based on contact I had with a few dozen johns over the years I would forgive a third of them, because they seemed dysfunctional toward women, it was not that they hated or devalued them per se, they seemed pitiable. Another third, the kind basil talked about, were just plain evil, a whore was a woman but a real woman was not a whore, so to speak. Men with a proper and good wife and a whore or three to service them in whatever way they expected. Nasty pieces of work.

Unfortunately Seville, the type of man who buys women's consent isn't interested in stories of how horrible the average prostituted woman's life is, and there are enough 'happy hookers' about who merrily tell them that it's ok, that what they're doing is funding college places, keeping food on tables for children and so on.

These 'Happy Hookers' are loud, and, in time honoured tradition, if you don't agree with them completely, or present them with facts from other sources or even question them, you get accused of being a SWERF, of reducing women's agency and the whole industry swings in to discredit people like Rachel Moran.

You have to remember that the sex industry is enormous. It is worth a hell of a lot of money to the people who run it men and they will do anything and everything to ensure that they continue to make loads of money from the women.

Every single conversation about this becomes about how mean and nasty radfems are trying to take these women's agency away, how we're all moralistic idiots who don't enjoy sex, that we're too fat and ugly to have made it in the industry, blah blah blah. Even when those conversations were started to discuss the men in the transaction.

Thanks Capt and everyone else here - it's an education :-)

The SWERF (and the TERF) stuff is all new to me and I'm finding a lot of the threads here fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. It's about twenty years since I was involved in feminist discussions. Time for me to get back out there. I'll start with a letter to The Economist!

That article is absolutely terrifying in its dehumanizations of women.
Chilling.

Whenever banning zero-hours contracts is mentioned the Tories always trot out the student who wants a zero-hours job to fit in with their studies, or the pensioner who is using a zero-hours job to top up their pension. The fact that 99% of people on zero-hours live with uncertainty, lack of income and the fuck-up end of a power dynamic is ignored because it works for a tiny, privileged few with other options and mainly because it works for the bosses.

We have to think about the women in Africa fucking fishermen for fish to take to market, or 17 year olds in Brazil who are pregnant with their fifth child, not the odd prostitute doing it to write a blog (though I have yet to come across a middle-class prostitute who doesn't have some severe 'daddy' issues or a history of body-hatred and self-harming).

I agree about the dryness and the dehumanisation. Especially as the writer seems positively aroused by the notion of Technology leading to Economic Benefits and contributing to Progress, in the sense of a more satisfying fuck for the punter.

The data can be put to use, though. For a start, they destroy the argument that sex workers sell a service, rather than a human being/body. In London, a white, thin woman with a D-cup bust can charge 50% more for the same 'service' than a black woman of average build who wears an A-cup. At that rate it wouldn't take long for a thin white prostitute's boob job to pay for itself.

Body shape, body mutilation, and economic discrimination based on race and appearance: if feminist critique is about anything, it is surely about this.

Ezinma - great post. I was trying (and failing!) to articulate thoughts like this.

I am amazed there has not been a feminist twitter / social media storm about this article, it is such a disgrace.